this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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Linux
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Memory safety is likely to prevent a lot of bugs. Not necessarily in the kernel proper, I honestly don't see it being used widely there for a while.
In third party drivers is where I see the largest benefit; there are plenty of manufacturers who will build a shitty driver for their device, say that it targets Linux 4.19, and then never support/update it. I have seen quite a few third party drivers for my work and I am not impressed; security flaws, memory leaks, disabling of sensible warnings. Having future drivers written in rust would force these companies to build a working driver that didn't require months of trawling through to fix issues.
Now that I think about it, in 10 years I'll probably be complaining about massive unsafe blocks everywhere...
Haha. At least you immediately caught exactly what they’ll end up doing if they bother to use Rust at all 😂